Michele Migliuolo is quick to point out that he is just a lowly physicist and not an energy technology expert.

However, it’s this lack of deep domain expertise that might be the key to his new role as commercialization alliance manager at Innovation Works.

The Commercialization Alliance is a project, headed by Innovation Works, that involves three other similar groups with all four members focused on working with scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to help move technology into industry applications.

And these applications are expected to be in more than the energy sector.

“This is a new program which reflects Innovation Works’ mission to help commercialize technology. We are all about helping entrepreneurs commercialize, helping universities commercialize, helping other inventors commercialize — and one great invention machine in the United States is the national lab system,” Migliuolo said.

This is just the latest move by federal officials to get the nearly $1 billion in federal research from NETL into the market. Just last year, a consortium of federal lab technology transfer offices hosted a conference in Pittsburgh to invite entrepreneurs to see what federal scientists are working on. In the 2013 budget, federal labs were expected to spend $140 billion on research.

Already, Migliuolo and his counter parts at the contract research firm MATRIC, the West Virginia economic development group INNOVA, and the Oregon commercialization group Oregon BEST, have seen hundreds of patents secured by NETL researchers as well as met with scores of scientists to talk about the research.

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